The Ministry of National Defense will adopt the Ministry of Science and ICT’s “proprietary AI foundation model,” in which SK Telecom (SKT) participates. This is the first case in the project to promote its use in the defense sector.

SKT announced on the 14th that it signed an MOU with the Ministry of National Defense at SKT Tower headquarters in Euljiro, Jung-gu, Seoul, on the “use of the Ministry of Science and ICT’s proprietary AI foundation model in the defense sector” to promote defense AI transformation (AX). The event was attended by Kim Myoung-guk, Head of Industrial AI at SKT, and Jeon Joon-beom, Director General of Defense Artificial Intelligence Planning at the Ministry of National Defense.

Under the agreement, SKT and the Ministry of National Defense will cooperate in areas including: ▲ development and proof-of-concept of defense-specialized AI models based on the proprietary AI foundation model ▲ collection, provision, and utilization of open data in the defense sector ▲ support for the use of GPUs in connection with national AI projects.

This agreement is part of the proprietary AI foundation model initiative, also referred to as the “national AI champion” project, and has been prepared as a follow-up measure to accelerate digital transformation by applying AI to the defense sector. SKT’s “Elite Team” has already entered the second phase of the proprietary AI foundation model through “A.X K1,” a 519B-class hyper-scale AI model with more than 500 billion parameters, the first of its kind in Korea.

SKT plans to lead the development of defense-specialized AI models based on its large language model (LLM) development capabilities and GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) infrastructure. It will apply model compression and optimization technologies that reduce capacity while increasing processing speed, and will further train the models with defense data to implement AI models optimized for the defense environment and provide them to the Ministry of National Defense.

In the second quarter, the Ministry of National Defense will provide SKT with GPU resources secured through the Ministry of Science and ICT’s “National AI Project.” SKT plans to use these resources to promote the development and proof-of-concept of high-performance AI models and to strengthen its cooperation framework based on national research and development (R&D) infrastructure.

Meanwhile, SKT’s Elite Team’s A.X K1 has been assessed as matching or surpassing the performance of global open-source models with similar parameter scales, such as DeepSeek-V3.1, in high-difficulty mathematics and coding. It has also been released under the “Apache 2.0” license, enabling commercial use under the terms of the license and allowing modification and redistribution of the model, thereby offering a high degree of openness.

Starting from the second-phase evaluation, SKT’s Elite Team plans to sequentially apply multimodality, beginning with image data. From the second half of the year onward, it intends to further advance the model so that it can also process voice and video data.

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